about
This is a public health advocacy podcast.
Public Health is Dead is a forward-thinking autopsy on how we've f*cked up in public health.
How do we prepare for future pandemics while we're already in the thick of one? And how do we reinvent systems that place some of us closer to death?
Through examining our past successes and failures, often through the lens of COVID, we plot a route out of apathy and denial towards health liberation for all.
You'll hear unusual tales of how we've battled infectious disease throughout history and mind-stretching interviews with undaunted public health advocates today.
This podcast is your anti-establishment field guide to surviving in the era of pandemics — full of vision, hope, and a little punk rock attitude. Public Health is Dead is a eulogy for the field as we know it and a gathering of voices to map out where we go next.
what does it sound like?
Kind of like Science Vs. meets Ologies meets 99% Invisible
Public Health is Dead is a scrappy indie show punching above its weight, keeping an archive of truth, and building up resistance to institutional abandonment.
Despite its name, Public Health is Dead exists to help fill a public health communications void and create space for critical, accessible, public health conversations the field has mostly been ignoring. Like how we let dogma get in the way of effective airborne transmission protections; or what we can learn from the ventilation system in an old theatre built after the 1918 flu pandemic.
On the surface, the show is a tongue-in-cheek lamentation for public health as a practice. At its core, the show is a call for accountability in the echoes of hollow values and a breath of fresh air after battling denial at every turn. Public Health is Dead is a sharp refocus on the task at hand: mitigating the mounting and compounding damage of COVID, and figuring out a real public health plan for the impacts of future public health disasters, which are already breathing down our necks as the temperature rises, alongside the drug poisoning crisis and the ongoing public health impacts of multiple genocides.
Public Health is Dead will spell out how we lost public trust, millions of lives, and created a worse disaster through the betrayal of our own leaders and colleagues. It will be a tool to help build a public health that answers to each other, not money and power.
We recognize there is no safe future without each other. And there is no safe future without adapting to new information. Scientific knowledge comes with a moral imperative.
Public Health is Dead is also hopeful, generative, inclusive and entertaining to listen to – a space for us to escape the pit of despair. We can turn disappointment into direction and chaos into community without choosing to leave people by the wayside.
This show is a tool to compost the radical ideas of yesterday into tomorrow's health liberation for all. You'll be inspired about where we go next, find community, scientific collaborators, or organizing accomplices, and build something new together.
Public Health is Dead aims to be anti-ableist, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist in facing the field's entrenched power structures.
IT’S A CHART TOPPER!
The week of its debut, Public Health is Dead hit the #1 Science spot in the
Apple Podcasts Canada charts.
But don’t take it from us…
Listen for yourself.
This might be the very thing that helps you through the storms ahead.
SHOW CREDITS
Public Health is Dead is created, produced, written, edited, and hosted by Daniella Barreto. Additional support is credited in each episode’s shownotes and on its blog page.
A eulogy.
Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here in memory of the institution of public health, to map and create a new future where true access to health for all is a reality. Preventing and mitigating disease used to be the bedrock of public health. Not anymore. Some say this is the dawn of the pandemicene (or, colloquially, the era of Finding Out).
We have arrived here fuelled by capitalism and its climate crisis and we are so far from ready. Our leaders have failed us in the face of undeniable scientific evidence. COVID comes at a heart-stopping short- and long-term cost to individuals and populations and economies. While leaders ignore the growing problem, there are inevitably more pandemics waiting in the wings. We need to figure out what to do about public health. Fast.
In Public Health is Dead, we examine the rot in a field we once believed in, pack up what's salvageable, and, together, plot a course for redemption – mostly through the lens of COVID, the biggest scale public health f*ck-up in living memory. It's not the only one though. And public health institutions have not worked for a lot of communities for a long time. This podcast is a tool to build knowledge, collaboration, connection, and power. We bring together the disparate voices of reason in public health and beyond as we work towards health liberation for all.
Guests include Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, Julia Doubleday, Dr. Joe Vipond, Hazie Thompson, and more...
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast app
N.B. We need to say it’s a bad idea for you to take medical advice from podcasts. Good thing this show does not offer medical advice! The point of Public Health is Dead is to share experiences and information that might help advance public health as a field and increase our collective knowledge. If you have particular personal medical concerns of your own, please talk to your own medical providers about it.
As this podcast is a response to broad, global public health failures, medical providers could also benefit from engaging with the contents and perspectives in this show :)
Contact.
Any inquiries, feedback, or suggestions can be directed to publichealthisdead @ [gmail] dot com